The gathering of modern Dutch film authors that the Netherlands Film Festival spotlights
this year is hard to demarcate. It certainly is not a group; the assorted directors are too
diverse and individualistic. But there are definitely some analogies, which can best be
described by what they are not.
To start with, the films by ‘the modernists’ for the most part have more success at international festivals than in Dutch theatres. None of them seem especially influenced by
Hollywood or Anglo-Saxon cinematographic views on scenario and mise-en-scène, which
dominated the Dutch film culture for quite some time. They rather draw their inspiration
from Asia, or Eastern and Southern Europe. Many of their films do not involve a story with
a classical dramatic build-up of tension. They prefer to film ‘around the corner’ and the
‘dead moments’ between dramatic events are at least as important. They are all real ‘authors’, directors who create their own world, often based on their own scripts. Another
person would not be able to finish their films, in the unlikely event that they could not do it
themselves. Their themes often involve the inability to experience emotions in a cold, alienating world, but they film their characters with compassion. In this respect, they dovetail with Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernism, sometimes indirectly via his contemporary disciples, like the Taiwanese master Tsai Ming-liang or the Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
The latter’s TROPICAL MELODY is a big personal favourite of Nanouk Leopold (Rotterdam, 1968). Some of the new Dutch modernists have a background in fine art.
Fow Pyng Hu (Eindhoven, 1970) played his own leading character in his first feature film
JACKY (2000), which he co-directed with Brat Ljatifi, who also comes from the world of
graphic design. Jacky is a Chinese Dutchman from Eindhoven who leads a rather humdrum
life. And when finally something extraordinary does happen, like the arrival of a
potential bride from his native country, the film leaves the dramatic moment of their meetingoff the screen. Instead, the makers chose for the drama of the interval, for the visualisation of a vacuum. In many respects, JACKY launched a new tradition in the Netherlands. To the surprise of the establishment at home, the film was selected by an important side section of the Cannes festival. Obviously, people there felt more affinity for modernistic vacuity and dead time.
Esther Rots (Groenlo, 1967) is another filmmaker whom hardly anybody had heard of in
this country when Cannes selected her first short film SPEEL MET ME (2001) for its competition, like two years later another short film IK ONTSPRUIT (2003). Her first full-length film KAN DOOR HUID HEEN (2009) was screened at the Berlin Forum and was relatively successful in Dutch cinemas. One could call Rots’ style expressionistic: even before the opening credits, leading character Marieke (Rifka Lodeizen) is assaulted at home by an unknown man. Far more important are the feelings of revenge and impotence that govern the rest of the film, expressed in details like a rat in a shower or a seemingly preposterous panic attack. Via these details, we get a glimpse inside Marieke’s head.
Nanouk Leopold, who went to art school before graduating from the Film Academy, is
more of a constructivist. Her three long feature films, ÎLES FLOTTANTES (Tiger Competition Rotterdam, 2001), GUERNSEY (Quinzaine in Cannes, 2005) and WOLFSBERGEN (competition Berlin, 2007), are progressively abstract in form. In the latter case it is already hard to say she filmed ‘around the corner’. In almost detached tableaux, large themes like love and death are dealt out as visual sledgehammer blows: it is Bergman rather than Antonioni, in a boned labyrinth with lots of windows and views. There are not many Dutch filmmakers, past or present, who can so obviously be bracketed together with the great film masters. Leopold’s work has not dealt with realism anymore for quite some time.
Because most films by the modern Dutch authors are set in identifiable contemporary
environments and sometimes focus on relatively seldom explored sectors of society, the
misunderstanding of (neo)realism could easily take root. Just as there is some kinship with
new Romanian film hits, like for example 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS by Cristian Mungiu (Golden Palm, 2007). The rather disconsolate town district of Amsterdam-Noord is the backdrop for both LANGER LICHT (David Lammers, 2006) and HET ZUSJE VAN KATIA (Mijke de Jong, 2008). In his first long film, however, Lammers (Zeist, 1972) does not want to make a social statement and, to be sure, his frames and soundtrack are highly constructed. The road accident that took the lives of a kick-box trainer’s wife and daughter is only a theme in the background, off-screen. What Lammers wants to bring forward, like Rots in KAN DOOR HUID HEEN, is the inability to cope with such a trauma in a modern, ‘dehumanised’ society. Certainly, a tragedy of this kind does hit home in a working-class neighbourhood. Lammers chooses metaphors and symbols, in earthly and self-explanatory ways. A sweaty sex scene is heralded by a close-up of four pink toilet blocks in a urinal. The gravity is offset by a good dose of irony.
Mijke de Jong (Rotterdam, 1959) uses an agile camera and claustrophobic frames in
TUSSENSTAND (2007) and HET ZUSJE VAN KATIA to shift a little further towards the realism we know from the Walloon brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. In the latter film, the alienation and distant reflection are in the script, not so much in the form. HET ZUSJE VAN KATIA could have been a melodrama, about Cinderella in the shadow of the sex industry, but evades this trap through the leading character’s pureness, a girl that looks at the World through an idiosyncratic-naive prism, because she has no choice. De Jong, by the way, made her debut as early as 1989, which alone puts her in a previous generation of film makers. The fact that her consistent and radical approach also connects her to the more
conceptual modernists that rather abstract emotions is justifiable.
Eugenie Jansen (Maastricht, 1965), too, has been making films for quite some time,
though initially mainly documentaries. She likes to experiment with hybrid forms that intentionally cause confusion about their veracity. TUSSENLAND (Tiger Award, 2002) had an African refugee enact his personal experiences and CALIMUCHO (KNF Award Utrecht, 2008) was sometimes wrongly considered a pseudo-documentary, because the leading characters are circus artists in reality too. The truth is different: CALIMUCHO is highly stylised and constructed, too, and shuns the traditional decoupage. The acting is only partly improvised and is often directed in every detail. The camera stays put for a long time and avoids the typical sequence of shot-countershot. If it had been up to the director, the film would only have consisted of total shots, and only the sound man would have zoomed in. But the less radical variation that we have now is still pretty abstract and alienating, which allows it to leave room for genuine acting in a corset that questions our watching habits.
You could call Simone van Dusseldorp (Tilburg, 1967) an impressionist. Her main characters are adolescents (DIEP, 2005) or children (KIKKERDRIL, 2009), but the original design of her work takes the edge of the prejudice that a children’s film should preferably pick aconservative style.
David Verbeek (Amsterdam, 1980) was so impressed with the vitality of the modern Asian
cinema that his first two feature films, BEAT (2004), shot in Rotterdam, and SHANGHAI
TRANCE (2008), filmed in China, can hardly be distinguished from a real Asian film.
This preliminary list is not exhaustive. There are other new filmmakers that stem outright
from an art tradition, like Mark de Cloe (Zwijndrecht, 1969), Froukje Tan (Flores, 1968) and Sonja Wyss (Bahamas, 1967), as well as the former leader of the theatre company
Dogtroep, Threes Anna (Vlaardingen, 1959). Their films are relatively more purely artistic
and play less with the modernistic film tradition of Godard and Antonioni to Wim Wenders
and Wong Kar-wai. But the switch from (fine) art to film gives a fruitful impetus to the Dutch cinema, which for too long showed too little affinity with modern art. After all, modernism in the Netherlands was precisely successful in art, rather than in literature, theatre or cinema. The fact that people in the Netherlands are unaccustomed to the combination of modernism and film may well be the main reason why the new generation of film authors was first successful abroad.
Hans Beerekamp